An undesirable characteristic of current automated telephone voice response systems (typically known as Interactive Voice Response, or IVR systems) is their poor usability. These systems are ubiquitous but are generally disliked by users. Companies that implement them are aware of this, but do it to save the considerable costs of having humans handle callers directly.
There are a variety of drawbacks relating to the poor usability of interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Most result from the use of voice as a media. Typically, users have to listen to a series of voice menus (e.g., “Press 1 to speak with Marketing, Press 2 for Sales, Press 3 for Finance . . .”). Menus are often necessarily long because of the complexity of the different choices. In this case, users often forget some of the choices, or the particular key required for a choice, by the time the last menu item is presented. Often, users end up performing an extremely complex mental task, such as memorizing the menu items and corresponding responses while simultaneously trying to decide whether their problem fits, for example, in “Marketing” or “Sales”.
Recently introduced display telephones, such as the Nortel M3900 series, allow text and graphics to be presented on a display. For instance, such display telephones can access websites and other sources of digital data through a network, and display the accessed information on the display telephone. Such telephones typically consist of a basic digital telephone plus a liquid crystal display for displaying textual and graphical menus, arrow keys or some other means of moving up and down and often left and right in menus, and “soft keys” i.e., keys to the bottom, top and/or sides of the display whose meaning changes with the display context, and for which labels are displayed adjacent to the keys.
A problem of changing over to a visual-based telephone interactive system, however, is the very large installed based of interactive voice response (IVR) systems. It will be very costly to manually convert these voice-based systems to visual-based systems that will work with display telephones. This is particularly the case with systems that were built some time ago and have proprietary interfaces with databases, particularly mainframe computers.
FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary prior art telecommunications system 100 that uses an interactive voice response (IVR) system. The telecommunications system 100 consists of a plurality of telephones 102, which when dialed, connect to an interactive voice response (IVR) system 106 by way of a public switched telephone network (PSTN) 104. The interactive voice response (IVR) system 106, in turn, is typically connected to a database 108 that allows information to be retrieved, such as bank balances, credit card status, information about stocks, etc.
There is a significant need for approaches that can help convert existing interactive voice response (IVR) systems, including particularly the programming of the interactive voice response (IVR) system itself and interfaces to existing databases, to allow them to be used for visual interactive response systems that can be used with display telephones, including both desktop display telephones and wireless display telephones.